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Several minutes past punctuated only by the scratching of my pen across the paper and the odd interested noise from Kiniun as he came across a particularly fascinating piece of the report's deathless prose. As time passed the levels of our coffee cups dropped and more pages in my notebook filled with my scrawl. This peaceful, positively studious atmosphere was rudely broken by the shrilling of my mobile phone.

'Hello?'

'Hi, Nerd, it's Harry. The police are here; can you head back? They want to check our witness statements.'

'Right, we'll come home.' I ended the call, looked at my emails, decided to ignore them, and said to Kiniun: 'The police need to speak to us, again.'

He rolled his eyes at me.

'Holiday over, I suppose.' He said.

''Fraid so!'

We paid our bill and picked up the car. The drive back to Rayton was silent, but faster than the journey out.

The scene outside the vicarage was a great deal busier than the previous evening. Two police cars were parked on the road and a mid-sized sports saloon. Alongside the uniformed police officers was a tall pine marten in a very smart dark blue suit, carrying a fawn coloured raincoat over one arm - it was as if he wanted to broadcast 'I am a police detective' to all and sundry, all he was missing was a fedora hat of the sort that had gone out of fashion some fifty years before. He looked round as I switched the car off. He reached into his suit and drew out a small black plastic wallet from an inside pocket. As he stood in front of us, he flipped the wallet open to reveal an enamel police badge and his warrant card.

'I am Detective Chief Inspector Martyr, you must be Fathers Shepherd and Kiniun.'

We shook paws and Martyr turned and gestured expansively to the scene in the garden.

'The sheet of,' He glanced at a notepad, 'Vellum that you found was interesting to say the least. A tissue type test confirmed that it was, in fact, made of cat skin and the sample matched records we have from an unsolved "missing" case from ten years ago. I've got PCs Herder, Marder and Lapis searching your garden to check if whoever did this left anything behind. In the meantime, DS Game and myself would like to just go through what you told Inspector Lamri yesterday evening.'

He looked around.

'Game? Game?' He shouted

DS Game appeared around the corner of the house, she was a tan and white springer spaniel dressed in jeans and a T-shirt topped off with a police tactical vest. She shot us a quick smile and then glanced at her superior.

'Hi! I'm Detective Sergeant Game!' She barked. 'Sir, shall I check the witness statements?'

DCI Martyr huffed and nodded to Game. We trailed after the Sergeant, behind us, Martyr was speaking to one of the uniformed officers. In the kitchen we found Harry sat at the table, drumming his claws on the wooden surface, his tail twitching in annoyance at his day being interrupted. Game took a seat and gestured with a paw that we should sit. She shuffled through her paperwork and looked around at all three of us.

'DCI Martyr and I have read over all your statements, but we would like to check your story with someone else. Is there someone who can confirm your whereabouts yesterday?'

'My mother.' I offered.

'Major Natasha Fuchs, Tal Borderer Regiment.' Said Harry.

We both offered telephone numbers and Game dutifully scribbled them down.

'I'm new to CID,' Said Game, 'I've never come across this vellum and before. I don't think the boss, sorry, DCI Martyr, has come across this before either. It seems disgusting to me. The report from the cold case file said the missing cat was only ten years old.' She shuddered and smoothed and ear against the side of her head.

the police officer looked at her notes again, suddenly she stared at me.

'Father Shepherd, do you think that this message was directed at you? Why would anyone call you a false priest? None of this makes any sense.'

I smiled at Game, she was right - from the outside the message was nonsense, even with what I knew, the whole situation seemed simply absurd. I spread my paws on the table, then scratched at the white flash on my muzzle. It was hard to guess how the police might react to my line of reasoning; or if they might think that I had simply lost my reason.

'Pagans!' I blurted out. DS Game put her pen down on the table, her head on one side.

'I beg your pardon, Father?'

'This area seems to have a strong pagan, umm, attachment. I think that I've upset what passes for the pagan hierarchy.'

'Thank you, Father. We'll be in contact.' Her voice was that kind of voice you might use to your lovely, but sadly confused grandfather. She gathered her notes together and left the kitchen, faintly there came a mutter that sounded distinctly like: 'nutcase'.

'I always said you were mad, Nerd.' Said Harry, smiling.

I slumped in the chair, my ears drooping. In hindsight, I may have come across as a little strange. Nevertheless, the strange dynamic in the village was like nothing else in Ironmont. 'In thrall', Kiniun's evocative turn of phrase was still at the front of my mind. Thrall, something that had to be fought against. Once, the Church had supported the feudal thrall system (a terrible sin); now the Church had declared the thrall system as slavery and all its practitioners as anathema. Even though the idea of paganism once had sounded outlandish to me, now, the more I read and the more that happened, the more likely it seemed to become; and the more likely some kind of supernatural thrall was becoming.

In the hall, the phone started ringing. I walked through and picked up the receiver.

'Rayton Vicarage, Father Francis speaking.'

There was a crackling sound, and then:

'Hello, Francis, it's Anna.'

My breath caught in my throat, my tail wagged gently.

'Hi.' I said, my faculty for speech apparently clean gone.

'You haven't forgotten about dinner tonight?'

'No, no,' I said, 'Shall I bring a dessert?'

'Yes please, love.' Came the reply, I could feel the blood rushing to my skin - thanking my dark fur for hiding the blush from Harry and Kiniun.

'Okay, I'll bring something, what time were you planning for?'

There was a pause.

'Half past seven?'

'Great, I'll see you then.' I replaced the receiver and stared at the ceiling, hoping that I had something to take for dessert that evening. From the kitchen, there came the sound of wood creaking as Harry tipped his chair back to peer into the hallway.

'I'll bet you all my small change, Nerd, that that was Anna.'

'How'd you do that, Harry?'

The lynx was flicking his tail from side to side and letting his ears twitch, a grin plastered across his muzzle.

'Call it a sixth sense; _or_it might be that I've known you for years, your tail won't stop wagging and you sound like a teenager trying to hide something embarrassing from his parents.'

'Who is Anna?' Kiniun chimed in.

'A friend.' I said before Harry could say anything; he had to settle with waggling his ears at Kiniun in an if-you-know-what-I-mean manner.

Before Harry could elaborate on his ear waggling, I said:

'I'm heading out for a walk, I need to clear my head - think things over.'

I walked out into the back garden and round onto the road. The police were still combing through my borders with minute precision. Martyr and Game both looked up as I rounded the corner of the vicarage. The pine marten stopped me with a paw to the chest.

'Where are you headed. Father?'

'Just for a walk, DCI Martyr.'

'Fine, just keep your phone with you. We might need to contact you.'

The paw was removed and I continued down the road. I followed the Amblehead Road and then on to the same little path I had walked with Anna a couple of days before. A gentle breeze blew across the river, wafting the scent of the cry woods and leaf mould through the valley. The breeze ruffled the fur on my face and arms, helping me to regain some of my calm. The wildflowers nodded as the wind caught them, adding their perfume to the air. A little way along the path, I stopped and sat down in the riverbank and rolled up the bottoms of my trousers. I let my foot paws dangle in the water. I laughed to myself as an inquisitive fish nudged against my paw pads. It was, just then, enough to stop and sit, to feel the flow of the water, the intermittent gentle probing, nibbling sensations of the fish investigating this alien visitor to their realm.

From the opposite bank there was a splash and a shriek of laughter. A group of teenagers were pointing and laughing at the friend, a young badger, who had (it appeared) been pushed in the river. She made use of the chance offered by her unexpected dunking to send a great wave of river water over her companions. It was an image that could have come from the Newtonshire Tourist Board. This could not be a community in thrall, it was all too normal.

This perfectly normal scene jarred with what was bubbling and roiling in my mind. Did I truly see some relation of Arthur Oxfold last night? What strangeness had been linked to the knife (still I could see the blood-red glow)? Could this really be some possession, some demon? Kiniun had been so matter of fact, as if he was talking about some incontrovertible and objective truth.

An hour passed, the cooling flow of the river, sadly, failed to help order my thoughts. There was a droning noise, and I watched idly as an emerald green dragonfly looped its way over the surface of the water in long, lazy arcs. It was a good year for dragonflies, they seemed to thrive in the Amble Valley. I stood up and brushed the damp river sand from my legs and headed for the church. As I was in the area, I thought to pop in and see Mrs Avis at the Post Office, I hadn't been to visit her in weeks. She was a lovely old chicken who had been the sub-postmistress for the village since for ever; her husband had died a few months before and I liked to check that she was okay. Also, I had a real weakness for her honey-cakes.

The long grass in the churchyard rustled and swayed as I passed through it. Halfway through the churchyard, I looked down and was glad I had done so. My trousers were still rolled partway up my thighs. Kneeling behind I gravestone, I began to tidy myself up. Then, all of a sudden, it went quite dark.

That was it, on paper just a few words, but from the lump that had risen between my ears by the time a came to; I had been assaulted with something rather heavy. Gingerly, I felt my lump and squeaked in pain - it was tender, actually it hurt like I didn't know what. I lay there for a moment, the next thing on the agenda was standing up; this turned out not to be an unqualified success. I did manage to achieve a state of upright, but, after a wobbly moment, I was flat on my face. After some undignified wriggling I ended up on my back with my tail sticking straight up between my legs. Some more unseemly struggling later, I managed to force myself into a sitting position with my back against a headstone. The root cause of my wobbliness (apart from the blow to the head) became clear: someone had tightly bound my legs and foot paws together with bright orange bailer twine, the sort that you usually see holding hay together on farms.

Right... I thought, I need to untie my legs. My arms were not tied, thank God, merely numb from my having laid on them; five minutes of paw waving brought the feeling back. It would be wrong to say that my freeing of myself was the work of a moment, but after ten minutes of wriggling and quiet cursing, I had the rope off my legs.

The next attempt at standing did work, although the effort left me woozy and light-headed. I leant heavily on the headstone. Once the world had stopped spinning and dancing around me and I had caught my breath, I became aware of a tightness across my back. I grappled with the back of my shirt and pulled a sheet into view. It looked very much like the vellum that was now, I imagined, languishing in a police evidence bag.

The writing on the sheet looked familiar, the same script as the previous note. Whoever was delivering these missives seemed to be determined to get my attention in the least friendly way possible.

Little priest, return the tribute. He is ours by right, he will feed the land.

Bring him to the ruins of the Abbey - the place where your puny

Church lost this place. Who are you to meddle with our offering?

It truly matters not: bring him, leave him - we will have him.

I balled the note in my paw and hurled it towards a tomb. The ball of vellum bounced off the monument and landed back at my foot paws. I growled, my hackles rising and my ears flattening against my skull. These threats, these weird messages and that dream - the language was so similar. Everything was circling about everything else, like some awful carousel. All I could see were little, insignificant snatches of something, something that was then whirled away from me.

All the same, there was something particular that was nagging at the back of my mind, something from that letter. I stooped down and smoothed the crumpled ball out on the top of the tomb. The note was no less unsettling on the second reading, but there it was, as clear as day: he, him. They were after someone, someone male.

This moment of epiphany was interrupted by the ringing of my mobile phone. The piercing noise of my ringtone bounced and echoed around my skull, causing me to whine in pain, as the headache that had been threatening to make itself known since I had come round really made its presence felt. I answered, mostly to make the ringing stop.

'Hello?'

'Nerd, it's Harry, where in heaven's name are you? DCI Martyr wanted to talk to you again, but he's given up and gone home - he said that he would phone in the morning. Oh, and you've been gone for the best part of five hours!'

'You're just being melodramatic.' I said.

'No, Nerd, check your watch - it's nearly six thirty.'

He was right, I must have lain behind that gravestone for the better part of four hours.

'Also,' Continued Harry, 'Anna phoned as well, she wanted to say that dinner would be served at seven, not half past. Sweet... young love!'

'Oh, do give it a rest, Harry.' I said.

There was a burst of laughter, which was cut short with a click as Harry ended the call. I put my phone back in my pocket and walked, stiff-legged over to the church. The key clicked in the lock and I slipped into the welcoming cool of the nave. By now, my head was pounding, so I hunted out a packet of painkillers that I kept in the first aid kit against just such a situation. A look in the mirror in the sacristy showed that the lump between my ears wasn't too obvious. I still looked a bit of a mess, my collar had come adrift and I had a fetching patch of grass seeds stuck in the fur of my right cheek. It took some time to extract the seeds, as I had to pull each one out of my fur individually with the tips of my claws. The collar was much more easily dealt with, simply a case of lining up the studs on the inserts with their counterparts on my shirt.

Foolishly, I prodded at my lump again, which was a mistake, I yelped and swore under my breath. From the tower there came the whining and clicking of the church clock's striking mechanism. This was followed by a loud clonk, and, after a yawning pause, the clock struck - the heavy tenor bell booming the hour out across the valley. The resonant tolling made me wince and look at my watch. For once, it was a good thing that the clock was running fast again, I still had five minutes to spare. I walked out of the church and down the path to the road. This time, I did remember to check before crossing; which was lucky as a lorry in the livery of the Royal Ironmont Postal Service came rumbling down the street at quite a speed. I watched as the red and gold lorry lumbered around the corner. Road safely crossed, I struck out across the green. Part way across the green, I had to field an errant rugby ball that had escaped from the less than complete control of a group of children.

Much to my own surprise, I managed to catch the ball before it hit me in the face. From the rugby players came a shout of:

'Sorry! Can we have our ball back please, Father?'

I flipped the ball so that I had the middle between my paws, the pointed ends towards earth and sky - just like I had seen professional players do, and sent the ball back the way it had come with a hefty drop kick. There was a cheer from the children as the ball went sailing through the air. My tail was wagging contentedly for the rest of the walk to Anna's door.